60 JfNtr ff ø ./ /0 ..ý // / // "Federal Bureau of Feelings) sir. It seems that last night you neglected to ask your wife how her day was. You have the right to remain silent." . enties. He had his first one-man show in 1976, in New York, when the Washburn Gallery, on Fifty-seventh Street, showed his prints of the Shaw Memoria] from "Lay This Laurel," and Joan Washburn has continued to show his new work. The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum have acquired prints of Benson photographs, and so have a few private collectors. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gave him two separate grants, in 1978 and 1986. But his income from pho- tography has barely covered the costs involved, and the financial strains of raising and educating four children- Barbara gave birth to Abby in 1975 and Daniel in 1977-have kept him work- ing as a printer. Starting in 1978, he was able to supplement his income the same way his father did, by teaching. Three years earlier, the photography department of the Yale School of Art had invited him to be one of several outside professionals who would come and comment on student work at a year-end review. Another guest re- viewer that year, Tod Papageorge, had since become the head of the depart- ment; when a job opened up on his staff, he got in touch with Benson and sug- gested that he apply for it. Benson applied, got the job, and discovered that he loved teaching. He commutes to New Haven from Newport two days a week, in the Model A, to teach gradu- . ate classes in photography. His special area is darkroom technique, but natu- rally he veers off into many other areas as well. He won't let his students take notes when he lectures, and he con- stantly pushes them to find things out on their own. "There's a terrible problem I run into in teaching, which is that when you tell people something, you keep them from ever knowing it," Benson eXplained to me. "If they find it on their own, they'll know it in a way they never will if you tell them. What I try to do more and more is to bring my students up here to my studio and get them really working." Although he finds it a little strange that young peo- ple should go to college to learn to be artists, he believes that he can be useful to them. "I certainly let them know that it's a very dubious thing to be a professor," he said. Yale has renewed his appointment each year since 1978, and he now holds the rank of full adjunct professor-"adjunct" meaning that he doesn't have to do committee work or attend meetings. "His knowl- edge is on a different level from that of anyone else in the field," according to Papageorge, "and he's the best public speaker I've ever heard, always clear and to the point." Even students who want the answers and shy away from darkroom drudgery find him charis- matic. "He's a sophisticated primitive," David Pease, the dean of the Yale School of Art, says. "He's just the sort of person we love to have around here." H OWARD GILMAN, the chairman and sole owner of the Gilman Paper Company, began in the nineteen- seventies to buy art works for his firm's Manhattan offices. At first, he bought contemporary paintings, but he also picked up a few photographs, and be- fore long he became so interested in photographs that he decided to concen- trate on them exclusively. Guided by an astute curator, Pierre Apraxine, he built a collection that reflects the entire history of photography. (His extensive purchasing also changed the price structure of the photography market, revising it sharply upward.) In 1980, Gilman and Apraxine got in touch with Richard Benson. They wanted to publish a book of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, and they wanted his advice on how to do it in the best possible way. Benson told them that the best possible way would be for them to buy him a printing press (something he had been wanting for years), and to make the book in a small enough edi- tion so that he could print it himself. They agreed. They bought him a Meihle twenty-nine-inch offset press, a German machine that was being made obsolete by automation, and had it in- stalled in the basement of his house in Newport. He insisted on printing each photograph separately (rather than on a sheet containing two photographs or more), and the prints had to be tipped into the book by hand, so that he could print them on different kinds of paper. Benson worked on the Gilman book for nearly five years. The result, pub- lished in 1985, was an outsized volume containing two hundred photographs, which ranged historically from Wil- liam Henry Fox Talbot's circa-1840 "photogenic drawing" of a leaf, one of the first successful photographic images on paper, to Diane Arbus's arresting portrait of a "Girl in a Watch Cap," dated 1965-68. Benson and Thomas Palmer, a young assistant whom he was training as a printer, made twelve hun- dred prints of each photograph (the edition was twelve hundred copies), in a process that involved putting most of them through the press many times. Benson used up to nine different colors to get the black-and-white effects he wanted. It is without question the finest book of photographic reproductions ev- er published, and major museums and